Lighttpd

Lighttpd is "a secure, fast, compliant, and very flexible web-server that has been optimized for high-performance environments. It has a very low memory footprint compared to other webservers and takes care of cpu-load. Its advanced feature-set (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) make lighttpd the perfect webserver-software for every server that suffers load problems."

Using php-fpm

There is no adaptive spawning anymore in recent lighttpd releases. For dynamic management of PHP processes, you can use php-fpm.

# pacman -S php-fpm
# rc.d start php-fpm

Note: You can configure the number of servers in the pool and tweak other configuration options by editing the file /etc/php/php-fpm.conf. More details on php-fpm can be found on the php-fpm website. You should also note that when you make changes to /etc/php/php.ini you will need to restart php-fpm

Styles (CSS) not working properly

The default lighttpd config does not include a mimetype definition for CSS so when standards compliant browsers get text/html instead of text/css they get confused and nothing displays properly. To fix this add an entry for CSS.